24 Princess Street, Manchester (0161 238 4348). Meal for two, with wine and service, £70-£120
A restaurant trading outside of its most appropriate hours is like a transvestite who hasn't shaved. It looks clumsy and wrong, as if it is only playing at being itself, or tottering about in Mummy's shoes. Obsidian in Manchester, on a damp Monday lunchtime, certainly felt ill at ease. As we sat in the cream-coloured curved booth, staring out at the serried ranks of barren tables and the shiny floor with nuggets of sparkling inlay like the rhinestones on one of Liberace's cheaper capes, and listened to the echoing thrum of young people's music, I wondered if it was fair to be there at all.
The answer, I'm afraid, is that if the restaurant has decided to be open then it is OK for me to eat there, though I can't imagine why they bother. As daylight finally leaks from the sky I suppose Obsidian finds a pulse, that the room swims with the heady aroma of fake tan and Lynx. Snobbery? Why of course, but a restaurant like this, which has accidentally unlocked the doors while still trying to get over its hangover, is ripe for a bit of invention.
The food? Well yes, there was some of that, but not a whole lot. In the evenings they have a longish menu which says things like "pressed duck, beetroot jelly, Puy lentil salad, pain d'épice" or "roasted monkfish, chorizo foam and oil, courgette, smoked chestnut". They sound quite nice, don't they? A little bit too much of the old "kitchen sinking", a new and terribly clever term of mine for menu descriptions which list absolutely everything on the plate apart from the kitchen sink. But interesting all the same. What the website omits to mention is that none of this is available at lunchtime. It offers three courses for £13.50, plus a bar menu, all of it pretty plain modern British bistro food, which means random. Much like having lunch in a restaurant that should be closed.
Desperate for something to give us a sense of the place, we mixed and matched from both menus. The waitress looked flummoxed. She wasn't sure she could do that. I looked around the empty room. Why? Too much to cope with? I waved my hands at her like Obi-Wan hypnotising some imperial stormtroopers. "It won't be any trouble," I said. "It won't be any trouble," she repeated back.
She was wrong. We waited. And waited. It took 40 minutes to deliver a goat's cheese mousse with Parma ham and peas from the set price menu and a salad of black pudding, apple and soft-poached egg from the bar menu. There are loads of things I can do in 40 minutes. I could have put these two dishes together, done the washing-up and still had time left over for a crafty fag, if I smoked. Which, Mother, I don't. Much. They weren't bad. Nor were they great. There were broad beans in among the peas, which were chalky. The salad was too much underdressed frisée with crumbled black pudding. It was food. We ate it. We were hungry.
My main was slow-cooked lamb shoulder. There's so much lamb shoulder being slow cooked these days, I'm beginning to wonder what's been happening to the rest of the animal. It was fine, a solid round of well-braised, well-seasoned meat. Underneath was a mound of soft mash which you just know the chef has been working at for years. A bar menu dish of "market-fresh fish grill" was not a lot for £18. Initially we were told it was haddock, then that it was a kind of brill. (How many kinds are there?) The sauce vierge – chopped tomatoes, capers, lemon juice, basil, etc – had got into a fight with more frisée and the two lay intertwined on the plate, as if knackered from the effort.
Desserts were various riffs on rhubarb, the default ingredient for restaurants in the northwest which want to look like they care, and a Manchester tart, with a very good crisp pastry shell, some nice peaks of meringue, and bits of banana which had no business being there. Which, frankly, described your reviewer and his companion rather too precisely. Oh well. The train journey was nice.
Email Jay at jay.rayner@observer.co.uk or visit theguardian.com/profile/jayrayner for all his reviews in one place
